Communicating Efficiently......

I recently had the pleasure of lecturing to my old local Royal Aeronautical Society branch in Belfast - an unexpected honour as I had learned a lot as a young engineer in Shorts Brothers (as it was then) from these sorts of lectures. A chance encounter in Farnborough with an old friend led to a conversation of what I’d been doing in the intervening thirty years since I left the country, which led to an invitation to pass on some useful insights. The subject matter was pretty open, and we settled on content suitable for the entertainment of the grey-beards and education of the students.

The whole experience of preparing, delivering and critiquing the lecture was hugely educational – in very surprising ways. To keep it engaging – and since there was little I could tell the experienced grey-beards anyway – the lecture focused on a few key anecdotes where lessons learned as part of the team experience had framed my subsequent career.

Naturally, all “sensitive” anecdotes had to be phrased agnostically to ensure a few past clients wouldn’t be embarrassed – at least those who were still in business. So I started to write a summary of interesting incidents and encounters from my past that would be useful material from which to edit the lecture content. Sounded like a simple task, expected to be done in about three evenings and six pages.

Three weeks and thirty-two pages later, I called a halt. It was the first time I’d actually tried to summarise influential experiences on my career, and I hadn’t realised there were so many, mostly interlinked. It also brought home to me that the main influencing events weren’t always the major ones. I rather liked the final lecture content I eventually came up with – such when I learned that an acceptable glideslope indicator response when flying an ILS on my CPL/Multi/IR course was different from my engineering test plan tolerances…...a lot different…..

Delivering the lecture wasn’t my best performance ever. But it didn’t need to be. So many old work colleagues were in the audience it just felt like continuing a conversation after thirty years – one where I’d stop once in a while and fill in the back-story to the other members of the audience about what was being discussed. What struck me thinking about it afterwards was the sheer volume of information that could be exchanged in simple phrases – provided both sides of the conversation were listening properly. And (some) Northern Irish folk are extremely good at that.

They’re also painfully honest. Hence critiquing the lecture afterwards over dinner with my contemporaries made me a bit nervous given my initially hesitant delivery. I needn’t have worried, it was well received – but more interestingly, it generated a few educational anecdotes from them that I was unaware of.  Which, in turn, led to other useful conversations. A great end to a good evening.

There was one big take-away from this – the right environment for information exchange can be hugely productive yet simple and effortless and honest. But it is highly sensitive to the setting. Get it right, and it is the most cost-effective productivity tool you can have. Get it wrong, and stifling the information flow will hammer both your productivity and your profits.

Like the best sports teams, engineering programme success is all about optimising that crucial environmental chemistry to maximise the information exchange….and always my first activity when stepping in to help solve a problem, usually with the existing team. Works every time where a project is salvageable. Need help? Just call!